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Topic: The Impossibility Argument (Read 83664 times)

It is so often the case that Christians, theists, and religious people in general attempt what I like to call The Impossibility Argument. Basically, the argument goes something like this:

P1-X phenomena looks intelligently designed P2-If the likeliness of X occurring w/out a designer is very low then it is impossible without an intelligent designer P3-Complexity and fragility indicate a designer for XP4-The occurrence of X shows signs of complexity, fragility, and a low likeliness w/out an intelligent designer C-Therefore, X is impossible without an intelligent designer

This argument is often used in relation to the origin of the universe "from nothing" in cosmology, the alleged "fine tuning" of cosmological constants in our universe, or common descent (evolutionary common ancestry) in biology. I would like to know your response to it. Is it sound? Why or why not?

This is a restating of the Argument from Incredulity. The theist is equating their personal lack of comprehension as to why a given phenomena arises without intelligent direction with a universal constant.

If they're open to new evidence, that incomprehension can sometimes be addressed by showing them how X, despite its seeming complexity and fragility can arise naturally. The evolution of the vertebrate eyeball is a good example; Darwin himself found it useful in his work. We can find eyes at many levels of complexity in organisms alive today, clearly serving their owners quite well:http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB921_1.html

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Live a good life... If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.--Marcus Aurelius

It's no quite the argument from incredulity, at least not to the person putting the argument forward anyway. I listened to Alvin Plantinga lecture some years ago and the basis of his lecture series really amounted to what Median sets out above.

The real problem with that style of argument is the fact that the proponent of the argument doesn't have any way to show that the likelihood of something is low or high and even whether that matters as far as the possible event happening is concerned. After all, we know that extremely unlikely events do actually happen - people win lotteries at tiny odds for example. I think where proponents of this sort of argument fall down is not understanding that very tiny chances of something happening is not the same thing as that event will never happen and neither is it the same as saying that the event would take nearly for ever to happen. After all, I could win a lottery the first time I try!

The other thing that is not appreciated is that in terms of evolution, the numbers of individuals involved is huge so that one is not waiting for eternity for one single amoeba to evolve into something else - one is waiting for vast numbers of amoebas to change and that cuts the time and reduces the odds of it happening.

As for religious folks getting into cosmology - well it's just madness. Scientists are trying to grapple with the maths of how it might have happened as well as straining the limits of practical science to look for evidence. These are some of the best brains on the planet. We do not have a clear picture of what happened, yet theists insist that because we don't have that clear picture 'god-did-it'! They get shirty if one asks how god arrived on the scene though!

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No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such that its falshood would be more miraculous than the facts it endeavours to establish. (David Hume)

Imagine that you are out shopping. You are going to have people pass by you quite closely. Look at one of those people: Both your life and their life were so arranged that on that day, in that place and at that time, your lives met!

How amazing is that? From both of your births, this moment was destined. Surely there is some god or other somewhere? Or does that mean that god spends all his time arranging such events? It would at least explain why he has no time to heal amputees.

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Nobody says “There are many things that we thought were natural processes, but now know that a god did them.”

The one thing that intrigues me the most about The Impossibility Argument is that religious believers literally have no data to work with by which to support the premise when they advance it. How do they know it is impossible for the universe to have arisen from what we otherwise observe (and call) "nothing"? How do they know the evolutionary processes of common descent is impossible? As with most things pertaining to their faith, it seems faithers are willing to just assume the very thing they need to prove - and this is because the overwhelming majority of them came to believe the things they do, not by evidence or good reason, but by responding to an appeal to emotion and the willingness to practice intellectual laziness in order to satiate their "I just have to have an answer!" mentality.

They seem to think thusly: "Lemme see, with regards to the issue at hand, you, an atheist, have a variety of sciences to back up your claim about thing X. Astronomy, physics, mathematics, chemistry, repeated observations, confirmation from CERN, accurate predictions and other things I don't like. But I, as a believer, would be greatly inconvenienced if your argument is true, hence I must protest and make stuff up and in general flutter through reality looking for tiny bits of hope that might, if I squint just right, back up what I want to be true. Why can't you respect that?"

But given that most believers prove they have no standards for proof once they accept the god thing, I guess this problem shouldn't be too surprising.

Thoroughly shuffle a standard 52-card deck (~7 good riffle shuffles is enough to achieve all possible configurations of a deck.)

The number of possible configurations of a 52-card deck is 52! (8.07 x 10^67).

Therefore, the odds of shuffling the deck to its current configuration is 1/52! (1 in 8.07 x 10^67).

The universe is approximately 13.77 billion years old (1.377 x 1010 years).

There are 3.156 x 107 seconds in a year.

Thus, the universe is approximately 4.347 x 1017 years old.

Thus, if you had 1 trillion shuffling machines each shuffling 1 trillion decks per second, they would have shuffled approximately 4.345 x 1038 decks since the beginning of the universe.

Thus, the odds of 1 trillion shuffling machines each shuffling 1 trillion decks per second since the beginning of the universe has a (4.345 x 1038)/(8.07 x 10^67) chance of matching your current deck shuffle, which calculates to a 1 in 185,599,780,135,320,806,725,326,905,205 chance of producing the deck you hold in your hand.

^^^ An interesting rebuttal indeed. However, I'm surprised that you are not (at least in part) persuaded by this kind of argument. It is only your personal experience that leads you to think there is a deity?

This is merely a question. Your card-shuffling post said that if you had a trillion shuffling machines, any given shuffle couldn't possibly exist (using the logic you were countering).

If you had 185,599,780,135,320,806,725,326,905,205 trillion shuffling machines, could it? (Understanding that there isn't enough material in the universe to make that many shuffling machines and decks of cards).

Note: That huge number is the one you gave as the odds against a specific shuffle.

I'm asking because the "1 trillion shufflling machines" number seemed a bit arbitrary. And you usually aren't arbitrary.

1017 and 1067 are 1050 apart. When multiplying, we add exponents. So if the number of machines x the number of shuffles per second equals 10 50 (say, 1025 each or however else you want to distribute it), your odds would reach 4.34/8.07 or ~54%.

I picked trillion (1012) because it is the largest large number most people can name and have some scope of size. Most people can't appreciate exponential notation's size as well.

The point is that we do something that looks like more mathematically impossible than evolution as a game without thinking anything of it.

Thank you Mooby. I was guessing that you choose one trillion because it was easy to understand, but I wasn't sure.

I am also aware that very few people understand what a trillion is. I googled it (I understood the zeros, but it is hard to picture such large numbers). I found this little article (http://www.zerohedge.com/article/what-does-trillion-dollars-look-0), and thought "Okay, I get it". Then I thought about it a little more. The trillion illustrated in said article is of hundred dollar bills. So it pictures only one percent of a trillion. Crap that's a big number.

Yes, and if you put that money in a warehouse and 1000 of those warehouses into a really large lot, you get 1015. And if you put 1000 of those lots around the country, you get 1018. And if you get 1000 of those countries across the planet, you get 1021. And if you put 1000 of those planets in a solar system, you get 1024. And if you put 1000 of those solar systems in a galaxy, you get 1027. And if you put 1000 of those galaxies in a star system, you get 1027. And if you put 1000 of those star systems in a universe, you get 1030. And if you put 1000 of those universes in a multiverse, you get 1033 and are just under halfway to understanding how big 1067 is.

This place, WWGHA, that constantly digs into the depths of whether a god exists, from every angle we can imagine - may assume that theists dig into and analyze their beliefs in the same way.

I believe many theists are content with the "god is beautiful" level of theism, and merrily go their way throughout life, liking Daniel in the lion's den, Jonah and the whale, Noah, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, etc., and are happy with the delusion as they sing, and buy their french fries and cokes.

They do not consider the math proof of their position. It is a happy, surface god belief. I don't think they get to the level of The Impossibility Argument.

Not to rain on your parade, but given that 1036 is a thousand times greater than 1033, wouldn't that be a lot less than halfway to understanding how bit 1067 is?

I mean, the difference in scale between a human (1.7 * 100 meters) and the entire universe (9.3 * 1026 meters) is still smaller than the difference in scale between 1 * 1033 and 1 * 1067. That means that after all that work imagining things, you're still only a tiny fraction of the way there - less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent (10-26).

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Nullus In Verba, aka "Take nobody's word for it!" If you can't show it, then you don't know it.

I think it gives a good sense of the difficulty in trying to comprehend 'largeness'.

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"When we landed on the moon, that was the point where god should have come up and said 'hello'. Because if you invent some creatures, put them on the blue one and they make it to the grey one, you f**king turn up and say 'well done'."

This place, WWGHA, that constantly digs into the depths of whether a god exists, from every angle we can imagine - may assume that theists dig into and analyze their beliefs in the same way.

I believe many theists are content with the "god is beautiful" level of theism, and merrily go their way throughout life, liking Daniel in the lion's den, Jonah and the whale, Noah, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, etc., and are happy with the delusion as they sing, and buy their french fries and cokes.

They do not consider the math proof of their position. It is a happy, surface god belief. I don't think they get to the level of The Impossibility Argument.

Actually, another one of the reasons I brought this topic up was precisely because I hear this argument from "garden variety" theists all the time (my dad included). "Oh life is just impossible without God..." etc.

Not to rain on your parade, but given that 1036 is a thousand times greater than 1033, wouldn't that be a lot less than halfway to understanding how bit 1067 is?

Halfway to understanding is not to be confused with halfway in magnitude. Halfway in magnitude is 5 x 1066.

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I mean, the difference in scale between a human (1.7 * 100 meters) and the entire universe (9.3 * 1026 meters) is still smaller than the difference in scale between 1 * 1033 and 1 * 1067. That means that after all that work imagining things, you're still only a tiny fraction of the way there - less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent (10-26).

Not really, you just have to go up in scale by a factor 1000 for each 3 exponents, or if that's too hard, go up by a factor of 10 for each exponent. It's only 11 more 1000 scale jumps from 33 to 66 (and then add in a 10 jump.) So yeah, roughly halfway to understanding.

I always stop the argument here with the question "what is there that is NOT intelligently designed?" IF a god created everything, then there is no basis for comparison.

Only the atheist can look at things and say "that was designed, that was not". So only an atheist can make this argument - but of course they never would. So for me, it is flawed right from the get-go.

It is so often the case that Christians, theists, and religious people in general attempt what I like to call The Impossibility Argument. Basically, the argument goes something like this:

P1-X phenomena looks intelligently designed P2-If the likeliness of X occurring w/out a designer is very low then it is impossible without an intelligent designer P3-Complexity and fragility indicate a designer for XP4-The occurrence of X shows signs of complexity, fragility, and a low likeliness w/out an intelligent designer C-Therefore, X is impossible without an intelligent designer

This argument is often used in relation to the origin of the universe "from nothing" in cosmology, the alleged "fine tuning" of cosmological constants in our universe, or common descent (evolutionary common ancestry) in biology. I would like to know your response to it. Is it sound? Why or why not?

While on the surface this is an appeal to increduilty, it is also just a buried "special pleading" argument. Who designed the designer?

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An Omnipowerful God needed to sacrifice himself to himself (but only for a long weekend) in order to avert his own wrath against his own creations who he made in a manner knowing that they weren't going to live up to his standards.

This place, WWGHA, that constantly digs into the depths of whether a god exists, from every angle we can imagine - may assume that theists dig into and analyze their beliefs in the same way.

I believe many theists are content with the "god is beautiful" level of theism, and merrily go their way throughout life, liking Daniel in the lion's den, Jonah and the whale, Noah, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, etc., and are happy with the delusion as they sing, and buy their french fries and cokes.

They do not consider the math proof of their position. It is a happy, surface god belief. I don't think they get to the level of The Impossibility Argument.

emphasis added.

I don't think most people realize that JC Superstar is, if not completely, then mostly, about Judas and how he didn't believe Jesus was divine--up to the moment he died. I love the musical, but it's really a horrible story about a well-intentioned guy thinking his best friend was going away from the message they'd tried to espouse together, and his eventual need to betray said best friend. "Poor old Judas; so long Judas..."

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...religion is simply tribalism with a side order of philosophical wankery, and occasionally a baseball bat to smash...anyone who doesn't show...deference to the tribe's chosen totem.

~Astreja

To not believe in god is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place.

^^^^Godspell is an incomprehensible hippie mess, esp. if someone is not up on their NT stories. I think a lot of people have no idea what's going on with all the random parables, and strange non sequitors from Jesus. Kinda like the bible itself.[1] But there are a lot of really nice songs. My daughter was just in it. The kids did an incredible job with some very challenging material.

Jesus, in a very extended and dramatic Evita-like scene, dies in the last scene. (I'm not spoiling the play for anyone, am I?) It is extremely sad and people in the theater always cry at the ending.

I commented to some other people about how wrenching the play's ending was, and one older lady said, "Well the audience needs to learn about what happened, because it's a true story."

Similarly, I know I missed a lot of what was going on in Thor, because I don't know very much Norse mythology. Or maybe I was just distracted by this incredibly hot Australian man walking around on screen...

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When all of Cinderella's finery changed back at midnight, why didn't the shoes disappear? What's up with that?

I watched a debate where a theist said that there are numerous plants that are inhabitable so there has to be a god to create this one. I honestly believe they , theist, lack imagination to anything that does not fit into their little circular reasoning.

It is so often the case that Christians, theists, and religious people in general attempt what I like to call The Impossibility Argument. Basically, the argument goes something like this:

P1-X phenomena looks intelligently designed P2-If the likeliness of X occurring w/out a designer is very low then it is impossible without an intelligent designer P3-Complexity and fragility indicate a designer for XP4-The occurrence of X shows signs of complexity, fragility, and a low likeliness w/out an intelligent designer C-Therefore, X is impossible without an intelligent designer

This argument is often used in relation to the origin of the universe "from nothing" in cosmology, the alleged "fine tuning" of cosmological constants in our universe, or common descent (evolutionary common ancestry) in biology. I would like to know your response to it. Is it sound? Why or why not?

I think you make a mistake assuming that anybody who favors the irreducible complexity theory, or intelligent design, is religious, or if they are religious, that that they automatically cannot also be scientific and/or logical on any topic. I think Christians are motivated to believe in intelligent design but they can make non-religious arguments for intelligent design that are logical. I read the God is Imaginary proofs and they were all logical except for the ones about evolution in which he, or they, appear to have no skepticism at all.

How do you really dispute the logic that is doesn't seem possible that all these random mutations occurred in such a way to create something useful. As they argue, part of an eye is useless, part of an important cell structure is useless. Random mutations have no goal yet evolution seems to suggest they can achieve a goal without even having it the first place. It seems like vision is something that would be have to be thought of in advance of a structure that allows vision. And this follows billions of times throughout the entire body with various organs and enyzmes and whatever that keeps life viable. A complex structure like an eye needs all the parts to come together at once and work together, and evolution can't explain how that happens.

Now, the God is Imaginary makes the point that if complexity means there must be a God or a creator, then who created God or creator. They say this disproves the irreducible complexity argument as regards to life on earth but does it? What if something did create the creator of us? It is only conjecture to assume that nothing could have created something that might have created us.

I don't think Darwinists have proved their theory anymore than Christians and other religious people have proved there is a God. It seems like they conflate natural selection and variation within species with cross species evolution.

It seems impossible that evolution would result in a man's private parts by random and then female private parts by random and then the sex drive resulted by random chance and then pregnancy resulted by random chance. It seems like the plan had to be reproduction from the start for this result to occur.

Why is reproduction even necessary in terms of survival of the lifeform itself? It isn't beneficial to the original lifeform from its own survival to produce offspring. I also have read that the more primitive asexual forms of reproduction are actually more efficient than sexual reproduction in terms of number of offspring so why wouldn't evolution favor that type?

« Last Edit: October 19, 2013, 01:38:03 AM by DrTesla »

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"You want to know who just loves abortions? God loves abortions. He performs them all the time and not even for the money. " NoGodsForMe

"I wish it was men who got pregnant b/c we would squirt out these babies and go about our business. We don't have be divas on this stuff." DrTesla

It isn't beneficial to the original lifeform from its own survival to produce offspring.

Welcome to the forum, DrTesla - why do you think that evolutionary theory says that this has to be the case?

Thank you for the welcome.

I don't know what the evolution theory says about that. I meant that as an implied question more or less. I don't know how evolution would explain it as I understand evolution and I have the basic high school understanding of evolution, just a real basic overview. At least I think I do.

I thought natural selection "selected" beneficial traits that would arise through mutations and I could not understand how reproduction was necessary for a specific lifeform's survival in its environment. I've talked to advocates of evolution about this in the past, some friends and then some people on a yahoo chatroom, and I thought they said that reproduction is about survival of the lifeform, which seems to be conflating survival with reproduction. But, I guess if the lifeform does not reproduce, evolution isn't even possible at all as the lifeform will go extinct. I don't know....I've always been confused about this aspect.

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"You want to know who just loves abortions? God loves abortions. He performs them all the time and not even for the money. " NoGodsForMe

"I wish it was men who got pregnant b/c we would squirt out these babies and go about our business. We don't have be divas on this stuff." DrTesla

I think you make a mistake assuming that anybody who favors the irreducible complexity theory, or intelligent design, is religious, or if they are religious, that that they automatically cannot also be scientific and/or logical on any topic. I think Christians are motivated to believe in intelligent design but they can make non-religious arguments for intelligent design that are logical. I read the God is Imaginary proofs and they were all logical except for the ones about evolution in which he, or they, appear to have no skepticism at all.

It isn't that intelligent design is impossible. It's that it doesn't fit the way humans and other species evolved. When we design something like a machine (or a computer, or a program), we work to remove defects and improve performance. But we don't see that with natural evolution. Humans have a host of problems and inefficiencies that demonstrate a decided lack of intelligent design. Indeed, our technology is our way to overcome the handicaps of our own bodies.

Quote from: DrTesla

How do you really dispute the logic that is doesn't seem possible that all these random mutations occurred in such a way to create something useful. As they argue, part of an eye is useless, part of an important cell structure is useless. Random mutations have no goal yet evolution seems to suggest they can achieve a goal without even having it the first place. It seems like vision is something that would be have to be thought of in advance of a structure that allows vision. And this follows billions of times throughout the entire body with various organs and enyzmes and whatever that keeps life viable. A complex structure like an eye needs all the parts to come together at once and work together, and evolution can't explain how that happens.

This is incorrect. Evolution works by finding combinations that give an organism a survival/reproductive advantage. Once such an advantage is created, further changes can then improve it, either by making it more effective (adding functionality), or making it more efficient (reducing unnecessary baggage). That's how an organ like the eye could have developed naturally; by having successive mutations give it additional functionality (for example, being able to see at night, being able to differentiate colors, being able to resolve see shapes rather than patches of light and dark) and increased efficiency (by removing inefficiencies in the way it developed).

Quote from: DrTesla

Now, the God is Imaginary makes the point that if complexity means there must be a God or a creator, then who created God or creator. They say this disproves the irreducible complexity argument as regards to life on earth but does it? What if something did create the creator of us? It is only conjecture to assume that nothing could have created something that might have created us.

This is certainly true, but then you're following an infinite progression. If creator2 created creator1, what created creator2? Sure, you can answer that with creator3, but then you have the open question of what created creator3. There are only three reasonable answers to this dilemma. First, you have an infinite progression, where you have creatorn creating creatorn-1 and being created by creatorn+1; second, you have no creator; third, you have a loop where something ultimately caused the creation of itself.

Quote from: DrTesla

I don't think Darwinists have proved their theory anymore than Christians and other religious people have proved there is a God. It seems like they conflate natural selection and variation within species with cross species evolution.

Do you actually understand evolution? We aren't talking about a dog eventually evolving into a cat, or a spider into a fish. We're talking about a precursor organism that differentiated into two or more closely-related species (such as whatever the precursor for primates was). And this precursor organism would have been much closer in terms of genetics to other precursor organisms, thus creating a divergence between them that would have come from an earlier precursor organism, and so on and so forth. Naturally, the reality is much more complicated than my example.

Quote from: DrTesla

It seems impossible that evolution would result in a man's private parts by random and then female private parts by random and then the sex drive resulted by random chance and then pregnancy resulted by random chance. It seems like the plan had to be reproduction from the start for this result to occur.

No offense, but this clearly demonstrates that you do not understand how evolution works - you are approaching the subject from ignorance, and are claiming that the accumulated knowledge we have on it can't be correct even though you don't really understand it. Your arguments boil down to, "the eye is too complex, so it must have been designed" and "sexual reproduction can't have happened by accident, it must have been planned", which are both textbook arguments from incredulity.

I am not saying "don't ask questions", I am not saying, "follow blindly". Questions are good, keeping your eyes open is also good. But you need to work to educate yourself on something that you don't really understand, not simply declare that it doesn't make sense or that it's impossible. So your questions should be aimed to help improve your knowledge base, rather than dismissing parts of the knowledge base because they don't make sense to you.

Quote from: DrTesla

Why is reproduction even necessary in terms of survival of the lifeform itself? It isn't beneficial to the original lifeform from its own survival to produce offspring. I also have read that the more primitive asexual forms of reproduction are actually more efficient than sexual reproduction in terms of number of offspring so why wouldn't evolution favor that type?

It isn't "necessary", but it gives an evolutionary advantage. Genetic recombination (from two or more parents) provides a better chance at long-term species survival than simply creating clones, because those clones are going to mostly be copies of the original, and thus vulnerable to a disease, a toxin, or a genetic abnormality. It's like this; if you have a whole bunch of organisms that are almost all the same, then they'll have the same strengths and weaknesses (mostly). Look at the way we use antibiotics to kill harmful bacteria, for example. The only survivors are the ones which had a lucky mutation, since they have no way to recombine their DNA. So when humans get hit with a disease, you have some which are very vulnerable (say they have two recessive copies of a gene), some which are not very vulnerable (they have one recessive and one dominant), and some which are not vulnerable (they have two dominant copies). You'll have a lot more humans which are resistant or immune to it than you would if we used asexual reproduction.

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Nullus In Verba, aka "Take nobody's word for it!" If you can't show it, then you don't know it.